MADMAN - John R. Suler, Ph.D. - copyright 1995
Chapter 6 - Wandering
Maybe someday I will travel. I always loved stories about wanderers. I guess lots of people do. And where or how the protagonist roams doesn't seem to matter - ballooning to famous cities around the world, driving the back roads across one's homeland, or hiking mystical mountains in faraway hemispheres. The adventure of exploring new lands never fails to fascinate. But something else about the wanderer, something more illusive than travelogue storytelling, entices me. It's the essence of wandering, of drifting from place to place, from experience to experience, without any specific agenda in mind. No rhyme or reason shapes the path taken, at least not anything conscious. The impetus is more subtle, hidden, more powerful. I think of it as an instinct, an intrinsic urge to uproot from the familiarities of home and throw oneself into unpredictable circumstances. Free of responsibilities, possessions, and plans, free of careers and loved ones, where do you go? Do you choose a path or does the path choose you? You are driven by a need to search without knowing what you are searching for, or searching but for no thing in particular. I am tempted to say this instinct belongs to everyone. For some people, perhaps most, it lies dormant. In others it springs to the forefront of their life, triggered by some catastrophic crisis or by the building pressure of mundane living that frustrates the spirit. When I think of how fundamental this instinct must be, I am reminded of Jung. He said that all humans share a reservoir of ancient ideas and themes that have been passed down from one generation to the next, for thousands of years, perhaps since the dawn of man. These archetypical thought-patterns, the templates of human wisdom, manifest themselves most clearly in dreams, ancient myth, and ritual. They are guidelines for living, suggestions on how to be, that have been so valuable that they have become permanently etched into human consciousness. They are the universal psychological themes that transcend cultural and historical boundaries, and that Jung recognized in the hallucinatory babblings of his psychotic patients. Primitive man understood these archetypical images and used them freely. Modern man, blinded by science and rationality, has relegated them to the unconscious, only in dreams allowing them a fleeting chance before his naive mind's eye.
Maybe the image of the wanderer is such an archetype. Sooner or later, it calls to all of us. Then again, maybe not. Maybe this stuff is adolescent, romanticized daydreaming. Maybe we just need to grow up, settle down, and admit that there's nothing to find other than the responsibilities in front of our noses. But what do we say to the wanderer when he comes knocking at our door? What happens to the wanderer who never attempts the road?
Someday I will do it.
Someday.
Everything is someday. Everything important, everything we think we want and need, seems to lie someday in our future, like an ethereal carrot suspended in front of our noses. We live for some future attainment - and when we get there, there's always some future attainment further on down the line to take its place. Everything is a means to a means. We're constantly running and never reach the finish. We're weary, unhappy. And when we're not fixated on the future, we're stuck on the past - on some regret, sorrow, or longing. The past and the future don't even exist, but we're always preoccupied by them. We spend our lives hunting for ghosts.
What's wrong with the present moment? Isn't it enough?
That's what's so important about true wandering. In true wandering there is no past or future, no destination, no running to or from. There's just wandering.